Bohemian RhapsodyReview

There’s a scene in Bohemian Rhapsody, the new biopic of late Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, where Freddie and the band explain how they don’t want their music to be formulaic or conventional. Well, their music certainly wasn’t but the movie made about them -- which Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor consulted on -- is formulaic and conventional, embracing every trope of the rock star movie/showbiz biopic. That’s not to say it isn’t entertaining; it’s often very fun, but so is singing Queen songs at karaoke. The movie rocks past the finish line on the power of sheer personality, the charisma of Rami Malek’s energetic performance as Freddie Mercury, and the coolness of Queen’s music rather than thanks to anything especially novel about the film itself.

Bohemian Rhapsody was always going to be utterly reliant on whoever played Freddie Mercury and, fortunately, Rami Malek is more than up to the task, capturing the magnetism of the operatic, often campy performer. Offstage, his contrasting mix of vulnerability and self-assurance keeps the viewer invested in Freddie the character and in the movie even when the script is going through its cliche rise and fall of a rock star motions. Expect Malek to earn a lot of awards season buzz for his flashy performance here.

Malek receives able support from Gwilym Lee as Brian May, Ben Hardy as Roger Taylor, and Joe Mazzello as John Deacon, all of whom get mostly humorous moments to shine despite their roles being more thumbnails than fully realized characters. Allen Leech mines for sympathy in his portrayal of Paul Prenter, a former assistant who became Freddy’s personal manager. Paul and Freddy’s falling out makes the former the closest thing to a flat-out bad guy in the movie. Outside of Malek, the most crowd-pleasing piece of casting is a barely recognizable Mike Myers as an unimaginative record label executive who, in a very meta commentary, doesn’t think the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” is something kids will ever rock out to. Party on, Wayne.

Exit Theatre Mode

The movie is credited to X-Men director Bryan Singer, who was fired late into production and replaced by Eddie the Eagle’s Dexter Fletcher, and while we’ll likely never quite know for sure just how much of the final film is due to which director, Bohemian Rhapsody thankfully never feels like the product of two different visions. What we do get, though, is every beat out of every rock band movie ever made, a Greatest Hits approach to musical biopics that visits every expected narrative landmark along the way without ever quite drumming up any real conflict to test the characters or to reveal what made them so special. There are career highlights, concert recreations, and oh so many montages. While many of the funniest or liveliest moments in the film revolve around how the band made some of their classic tunes, it’s still textbook showbiz biopic storytelling. There are several music star biopics that manage to dig that bit deeper -- Sid and Nancy, Walk the Line, What’s Love Got to Do With It, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and Nowhere Boy all come to mind -- in getting to the core of their subjects than Bohemian Rhapsody does.

Everything happens relatively quickly and easily for Queen once Freddie joins the band and things then go pretty smoothly for most of the movie, up until the increasingly drug and booze-addled Freddie decides to try his hand at a solo career. There’s a decided lack of dramatic conflict and obstacles throughout a good chunk of the movie. Sure, they’re a bit short on cash at the beginning but soon enough they’re rich and famous. Maybe it’s because the film was made with oversight from May and Taylor that everything in it feels safe as the surviving members were reportedly very concerned about protecting and preserving Mercury’s legacy.

Bohemian Rhapsody never really digs deep enough to give one a solid understanding of what made Freddie Mercury or his bandmates tick. We get the basics and largely see only the most complimentary traits of Freddie, guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor, and bass player John Deacon, but finding out what each band member majored in at school is trivia, not character development. There are brief but notable scenes of Freddie’s immigrant family life, his strained relationship with his dad, and the casual racism Freddie faced, but for the most part, Bohemian Rhapsody quickly pivots back to Freddie the performer whenever it gets too close to scrutinizing Freddie the man.

The film gives significantly more attention to Freddie’s relationship with his longtime companion Mary (Lucy Boynton), to whom he was engaged before coming out, than it does to his later same sex relationships. Mary is an emotional crutch for Freddie and is the person whose moving on, as depicted here, affects him the most profoundly. Meanwhile, Freddie’s sex life is portrayed in glimpses (rest stop hookups, cruising nightclubs, wild parties) before his eventual romance with Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker), which would last until Mercury’s death from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991. The romance with Jim isn’t explored with nearly the same type of care as his relationship with Mary; Jim is never fully developed beyond the understanding that he’s a nice guy who came into Freddie’s life at the right time. The movie concludes just as Freddie and Jim’s relationship starts to bloom. For a film about the man who wrote “Love of My Life” and “Somebody to Love,” Bohemian Rhapsody is more concerned about Freddie’s journey to find that love than it is in exploring it beyond the cursory once he does.

The Verdict

Bohemian Rhapsody is fun but entirely superficial, playing it safe rather than trying to be as bold or brazen as its larger-than-life subject. It ultimately relies on the magnetism of Rami Malek’s portrayal of Freddie Mercury and Queen’s bombastic, beloved music to make up for its narrative shortcomings and by-the-numbers direction. The movie never quite digs as deep into what made Freddie tick as it could have, focusing on how he made his music rather than on a deeper examination of his personal relationships.